A RELATIONSHIP...FOUND IN A LITTLE BOX

who would have ever believed that a small box from Office Depot could totally change a relationship between a mother and daughter? i didn't. and to be honest, i never really thought about it either. but it did happen. to me. and my mother.

mama and i were never really close when i was growing up. i was one of five children, four girls and a boy. and i was the middle child. (and for those of you who know me on a personal level...THAT explains alot!) i think the rift between us began widening about the time i turned 11 yrs. old. mama thought that i was a rebellious young girl. she wanted me to "obey" the rules. and i wanted to live my life MY WAY. obey has never been a good fit for me. still isn't. i would never have considered  myself to be rebellious. i was just carefree. when i was younger, (i know...that was a loooooong time ago)...i never really felt like i "fit" with the rest of my family. and it wasn't that THEY made me feel that way...i just never felt like i measured up. i always felt like the "dumb one," "the ugly one," and i always had a strong desire to be around people. i could not stand to be alone. in later years, when i was in college and living away from home, this feeling became all consuming. if there was no one in the room with me, i would get in my car and just ride the streets. and it wasn't that i was WITH people, it was that i could SEE people. years later i would discover THIS about myself. that i didn't like to be alone with "me" because i didn't particularly like "me." and who wants to be around someone they don't like?

but anyway, my mother didn't really like me. Oh, i knew that she LOVED me...i never questioned that. but i also knew that she didn't like the girl that i was. it was hard on her, raising 5 kids, and i was always a troublemaker. (i became the black sheep in my family and held that title for quite a few years. but, i am happy to say that finally, finally i have passed that torch on! yay me! when i wasn't looking i think i grew up.) but i was always doing things i shouldn't have been doing, and going places i shouldn't have gone, with people i shouldn't have been with. and there was always tension. i can remember slamming myself up in my room after getting in trouble for something or other, and just saying to myself, "she is soooo mean. i will NEVER treat my kids that way. why does she have to be so strict with me...why do i get caught at everything single thing i do!" and i DID. get caught at everything i did. it didn't matter one iota if everybody else was doing the exact same thing, I was the one to be caught! we joke about it in my family to this day that i spent nearly my entire high school years GROUNDED! i would probably still be grounded today, at 50 yrs. old, if we lived in the same house!

around 1986 or 87, my father was transferred from his job as plant manager at the sugar refinery in clewiston, fl to the parent company at dixie crystals sugar refinery in savannah, ga., where he was a vice president for several years, until he retired in 1994. my youngest sister moved to ga with them and was attending college, so my mother was pretty much alone in the house all day. which she liked. she is much more of a loner than i am. she can be perfectly happy being alone and doing her own thing. one day daddy went to Office Depot and when he came home he handed her a little box. it was a piece of computer software called Family Treemaker. it was for tracking your familys history. she asked him what he had bought that for and he replied that he had seen it and thought it might be something she would be interested in. (he's thoughtful like that.) but, she wasn't interested in it. and it sat there on a table for a pretty good while. then one day, i suppose out of sheer boredom, or maybe a lack of a good book to read, she picked it up, installed it on her computer and started entering the names of her parents and my fathers parents, and her grandparents and BAM! she hit a brick wall. she didn't know who daddy's grandparents were. neither did he. and that began her quest to document our family's history. she went to the library a few times and began to do a little research, but it wasn't anything that consumed her. then.

in 1996 my father called me one day, out of the blue. he asked if me and the middle-aged man who would later leave me for greener pastures, would be interested in moving to savannah and taking over a floral business that had decided to sell. he thought that my sister and i could buy the business together and the middle-aged man who would later leave me for greener pastures, could transfer from the sugar refinery down in fl, to the one in ga. i had experience in the floral business, as i had just closed my own when i got pregnant with micajah. we were having ALOT of problems with a certain someone's EX-WIFE from hell and 500 miles between us was something i was surely game for. so, after getting the refinery transfer approved and selling our home and packing up to move to savannah, the deal with the florist fell through. that was a blessing in itself, but i'll write that story another time. rather than stay in fl we decided to go ahead with the move and we would open our own gourmet gift basket business. which we did. and that is a story for another time also. WHEW on that one!

shortly after moving my mother asked me to go with her to the library one day. when we got there she told me she was doing a little research on our family's history and asked me to help her out on the microfilm machine as she couldn't read the small print. i began scrolling through census records, looking for an ancestor and right then and there, on that very day, i became obsessed with geneaology. as did she. we began going to the library alot more frequently. then we began going to courthouses to look up marriage records and wills and that took us on trips to faraway counties all over ga, in search of more information. and more. and more. the BUG had bitten us and we were SCRATCHING IT!  i began my own research into the middle-aged man who would leave me for greener pastures, family. no one in his family knew ANYTHING about their ancestors. or, if they did, they weren't telling.

we have spent 13 years (so far) on our research. we have gone on countless road trips, logged in thousands of miles, been to more hidden cemeteries than you can shake a stick at, copied more records and stared at the grainiest microfilms of old census records...and we have had the time of our lives! we became so close, that you would never have known that at one time we could hardly be in the same room for long periods of time. we have laughed, we have wet dozens of pairs of pants, we have been chased by dogs and met some of the meanest and the nicest courthouse clerks. we have eaten at some of the worst restaurants that ga has and we have made more u-turns than any sane person would think possible. we have pee'd on countless back roads and in cow pastures and we have been attacked by angry bees and tripped over hidden barbed wire. and so many more things that i will be writing about one day. we both have huge volumes of family histories on every branch of our families. and they are priceless. to us. and through all of this, we became friends. i consider my mother to be my best friend, in fact. (sorry, Pam...but mama's come first.) and all of THAT leads me now to THIS!

about 2 or 3 years ago, mama and i were getting the itch to do just a short little day trip over to sylvania. it was about an hour and a half away from savannah and it was a trip we had made i can't tell you how many times before. it was NOT one of our favorite places to go. just a tiny little, rural town. but it was the town where her father and my grandfather, had grown up. it was very rich in her family's history, but there were two brick walls that she had run into. for eight long years she had been searching for PROOF that her father had a brother named Jesse. when she was younger, and many years before she knew she would have any interest whatsoever, she remembered her father telling her that he had had a brother named Jesse, that had died before my mother was even born. but, my mothers parents had long since been in Heaven, along with her older brother, who would have known, if anyone did, about Jesse. he was a history buff. but through all of her research, the only thing she could ever find was a reference to him in a letter, written by his mother in the early 1900's; and his name on a census record. she had gone through rolls of microfilm and newspapers looking for an obituary. we had spent hours at the family cemetery, me on my hands and knees, under huge shrubs, searching for his name on a headstone. but nothing. nada. zip. zero. she had all but given up on ever finding anything that would definatively prove that he had ever existed. and a good geneaologist knows you MUST have the PROOF. the other brick wall was that she could not find the maiden name of her fathers grandmother.

so, we decided that we would make one last trip to sylvania the next morning to see if we could locate the grandmothers death certificate. a death certificate will give the names of the deceased's parents, including the maiden name of the mother, in most cases.

that night, before we were to leave the next morning, i was in bed, sound asleep. suddenly i woke up with a very strong feeling that someone was in the room. someone that was not normally in my bedroom in the middle of night. the room was dark, but i could see a table and a chair, not my own furniture, and sitting in the chair was my grandfather. WHO HAD DIED in 1981. he was talking to me, but not out loud.  i could understand every single word that he was saying. and what he told me was that "tomorrow, you will find Jesse." it was as plain to me as if he were talking to me now. "tomorrow, you WILL find Jesse." and you are probably thinking to yourself right now that this girl is NUTS! but i will tell you, that i know, that i know, that i know...that my grandfather was in my room and he spoke those words to me.

the next morning i picked up mama and we were on our way when i told her about what had happened. and she was like you are now. uh, huh, okie dokie. my daughter talks to dead people.

we got to the courthouse first and we went to the book that has all the old death certificates listed in it, which we had looked at so many times before, and checked once more to see if her great grandmother had one listed. she had never been listed before. at the end of the names of all the Wilsons was a half of a blank page, signaling the end of the wilson names. by sheer coincidence, she flipped to the next page and there...on a page all by itself was the name Sarah A.E. Wilson. we just looked at each other in shock. we KNOW that her name had never been there before. we rushed over to get the clerk to pull the original death certificate and there on that piece of paper under "maiden name of mother"... was written, UNKNOWN. can you believe it? from the top of the rollercoaster straight down to the bottom. that's what we felt like. another dead end. (no pun intended.) so we left the courthouse and decided to head on home. just before we pulled out of town mama decided to go to the small town library to look up a cemetery location or something like that. i told her that i was going to find jesse today i could feel it. she laughed and said yeah, i'm sure you are. i went over to where they kept all the old microfilm records of the old newspapers. we had pretty much narrowed down the probable years he would have died....had he ever even existed, to within about 4 years. i pulled out the first roll and began scrolling through every single issue of the sylvania telephone, the newspaper for that town, looking for an obituary or a story of an accident. something. anything. and there was nothing. i pulled out the second roll and began scrolling and suddenly, right there on the front page of the Feb. 16, 1912 edition was this

i began hooting and hollering and saying, "I FOUND JESSE, I FOUND JESSE!!!" and my mother just looked at me like i was crazy and playing a joke and i was just beside myself saying, "really, really, i did!" she came running over to the machine and read the obituary and was just absolutely stunned! we both were. and i had goosebumps like you wouldn't believe! just as my grandfather had told me i would. i scrolled over another issue or two and there again, on the front page was a a memoriam, written by, guess who...my grandfather. in memory of his brother, Jesse. This is it

i made the copies of both articles and mama put them on these scrapbook pages to go in her book. we rode home that day in awe. another one of those GOD things. no one will EVER convince me that i did not hear my grandfather speak to me that night. i know with everything in me, that he came to me in the night and whispered in the dark, "tomorrow, you WILL find Jesse." and i have goosebumps even now.

my own daddy never knew that day in Office Depot what that little purchase would bring about in his family. he was simply buying my mother a gift that he thought she would enjoy. but he brought instead a gift that I would enjoy for many years to come. a new relationship with my mother...in a box. and for that, i will always be eternally grateful. i love you mama and daddy!

post note: my mother had prayed that one day she would find Jesse. and she did. another prayer asked. another prayer answered!